25/02/2010 DAI Rubicon Puts Supply Chain Delivery Solution in the Cloud

Ingres Corporation, the open source database company of the New Economics of IT, announced that DAI Rubicon, a global publishing service provider headquartered in Australia, selected Base2Services to deploy a point-of-sale supply chain delivery solution, built on Ingres Database and located in the Amazon EC2 Cloud. Ingres Database is the open source database that helps organisations develop and manage business critical applications at an affordable cost.

The complete open source supply chain delivery solution has consolidated and automated DAI Rubicon’s online ordering processes, expecting to save between $150,000 and $200,000 in operational expenditure annually. Greater automation also means less IT support, improved customer invoicing and the variable infrastructure cost ensures ability to scale quickly with Amazon EC2.

“We run a high volume, low margin business with bulk discounts and complex pricing schedules for customers and partners,” said Rob Turner, managing director of DAI Rubicon. “We needed to enhance our ordering experience and find a better way for customers to manage their logistics for online purchases.”

DAI Rubicon chose Base2Services because they offered a scalable, cloud-based solution that would make the ordering process more transparent, scalable and easier to manage without adding to the cost. The solution is built on the Ingres Database, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, JBoss, jBPM, and DROOLS.

“There is greater transparency in the process enabling DAI Rubicon’s customers to have better visibility of where their order is,” said Arthur Marinis, CEO of Base2Services. “We have also built into the solution the ability to identify bottlenecks for better automation processes.”

The Amazon EC2 cloud-based solution allows DAI Rubicon to only pay for what they use. It also scales rapidly based on actual demand, rather than forcing DAI Rubicon to pay for additional services not being used, or for the system to reach capacity and not be able to process and manage orders.

“There has been a lot of talk about cloud computing but not many companies are actually using it for mission critical applications,” said Jason Leonidas, managing director, Ingres Australia and New Zealand. “DAI Rubicon is a perfect example of a company harnessing the scalability of cloud computing and the flexibility, innovation and cost savings of open source.”

“Choosing mature open source software is dramatically less costly than using proprietary vendors,” said Marinis. “We get access to the source code to better identify any issues, and of course we build with open standards to ensure our customers never get caught up with proprietary lock-in.”

“It is more cost effective and lowers the implementation and ongoing operational costs of our business,” said Turner. “We now have better processes, better integration with our providers, lower infrastructure costs, lower support costs, lower licensing costs and need less people to maintain the solution.”